I oversee academic advising in University College. We have 20+ professional advisors, 20+ Academic Peer Advisors, and serve over 4,500 students at Illinois State University. We searched for several years for an online appointment system that would sync with our Outlook calendar. In consultation with our tech support, we held demonstrations with several other software options in the spring of 2011. We were hoping to improve our service to students, reassign time with professionals to advising and ensure our calendars would work for an Outlook campus.
After investing a significant amount of research, we decided to pursue Appointment Manager in the spring of 2012 and moved forward with implementation in the fall of 2012 for University College.
We experience impressive customer service and tech support. Boby Joseph was readily available, answered our questions and entertained our requests for future versions. Constantly improving E2E by listening to our needs and building the system to fit our work!
As an administrator, I was able to reassign time spent making appointments to advising students. E2E delivered “real-time” syncing with Outlook and was very easy to implement within our existing technology. This was a great relief to get our focus back to serving students. As students transitioned out of University College, they expected this service to be available elsewhere. Many departments/schools consulted with University College to learn how to capitalize on this product.
E2E experienced rapid growth and interest so our campus launched expanded usage on campus in spring 2013 and was purchased by Enrollment Management & Academic Services. Growth continued to occur and in August 2013, a campus wide steering committee was established. Now with the support of University resources, additional improvements were launched including:
- ISU branding – looks like an Illinois State web site the students could trust and came to expect
- Seamless integration for students, advisors and technology
- Reports: advisors were able to adjust appointment times, productivity reports, scheduling irregularities, pinpoint bottlenecks in work flow with the click of a button. It was also easy to export office data to Excel for manipulation of the entire unit.
- Historical data was helpful as we changed from a legacy mainframe system to a new student information system.
Wendy Whitman
Associate Director, University College
Illinois State University